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Google sponsors $30 million Moon landing prize

By Matthew Busse, Los Angeles and Reuters

Web search leader Google Inc. will sponsor a &dollar;30 million competition for an unmanned lunar landing, following up on the &dollar;10 million Ansari X Prize that spurred a private sector race to space.

Like the Ansari X Prize, which was claimed in 2004 by aircraft designer Burt Rutan and financier Paul Allen for a pair of flights by SpaceShipOne, the Google Lunar X Prize is open to private industry and non-government entities worldwide, organizers said on Thursday.

First prize is &dollar;20 million for the group that can land a lunar rover – an unmanned robotic probe – on the Moon, take it on a 500-metre trek and broadcast video back to Earth by 31 December 2012.

The prize falls to &dollar;15 million if the landing takes place by 31 December 2014.

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A second-place winner will receive &dollar;5 million. In addition, at least &dollar;5 million in bonuses are available for milestones such as finding relics from the US Apollo Moon landings, or from Soviet lunar explorations, detecting water ice or keeping the rover alive on the lunar surface overnight.

“What we’re trying to stimulate here is a widespread competition that will generate interest in people to get back into space,” said Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the Moon and an advisor to the X Prize Foundation. The announcement was made at Wired magazine’s NextFest technology showcase, which opened on Thursday in Los Angeles, California, US.

‘Offshore island’

X Prize Foundation founder Peter Diamandis agrees. “Our hope is to educate and change public views about the Moon,” he said ahead of the announcement. “The Moon is an offshore island of Earth that has valuable resources which will benefit us as we grow as a species. We should look at it in that fashion.”

NASA had considered a similar venture as part of its Centennial Challenges programme, but the agency so far has been able to fund prizes only up to &dollar;750,000. The NASA competitions also are closed to non-Americans.

“NASA is kind of an interested bystander,” said Pete Worden, director of NASA’s Ames Research Center in California and a longtime commercial space and lunar development advocate. “If a private company perfects a process to get payloads to the Moon, NASA will have a lot interest in that.”

The X-Prize Foundation decided on the goal of landing a robot instead of a human in order to make the prize attainable in the near future, hopefully in four to six years.

The US plans to retire its space shuttles in 2010 and develop new vehicles that can fly people to the International Space Station as well as the Moon. NASA, which landed six crews on the Moon between 1969 and 1972 under the Apollo programme, hopes to return astronauts to the lunar surface by 2020. They may find it a busy place, as Russia, Japan, India and China have announced their own lunar ambitions.

Permanent settlement

Diamandis said he guessed four or five teams in the US have the technical skills and financial backing to enter the race, and about the same number overseas. He estimated building, flying and operating a rover on the Moon will cost between &dollar;20 million and &dollar;60 million.

It could seed a new industry. The SpaceShipOne flights paved the way for the construction of a fleet of commercial suborbital spacecraft for Virgin Galactic, an offshoot of Richard Branson’s Virgin Group. Passenger service is expected to begin in 2009 or 2010.

Similar to the multibillion dollar satellite industry sparked by the launch of Sputnik, Diamandis envisions this prize as opening the door to industries that utilise the Moon’s resources, including silicon for large-scale solar arrays, and water ice for oxygen and rocket fuel.

“We’re starting on steps that will eventually lead to permanent settlement of the Moon and Mars,” Worden said. “That’s probably going to get led by the private sector.”

To help aspiring lunar explorers, startup launch services firm Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) of El Segundo, California, is offering to fly contestants’ rovers on its Falcon rockets at cost, which would be about &dollar;7 million for its smallest booster.

“I’m a huge believer in us becoming a space-faring civilisation,” said SpaceX founder Elon Musk, the creator of Internet payments scheme PayPal.